


Tomorrow Is a Long Time

by rosa_acicularis



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Characters From Various Eras, F/M, Unfinished Fic From Days Long Past
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-05-16
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:29:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3256685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>If today was not an endless highway, if tonight was not a crooked trail, if tomorrow wasn't such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.</em> </p><p>Rose Tyler, on the road to <em>Journey's End</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Some universes are more comfortable than others.

It’s a summer night, cool and dry, and she’s walked for miles without any sign of civilization. There is only open space, tall grass and gently sloping hills that fill the horizon, the high painted dome of the sky and the sweet-green smell of wind in her hair. For the first time in weeks she stops and feels herself breathe. Hears her heartbeat in the silence.

There are no stars left in this universe, but the moon shines in the east, silver-white against the cloudless midnight blue. She slips out of her clothes, spreads her dark jacket over the grass and sheds the dry-sweat cling of her shirt and trousers. She lies naked in the moonlight, swallowed by wind-rustled grass and the stillness of the night sky.

She falls asleep minutes later, her fingers curled around the dark grip of her gun.

++

That night she dreams about him.

He sits beside her in the grass, watching her sleep. When she opens her eyes, he smiles. “Hello,” he says. “Having a nice nap?”

She reaches up and touches his face, the way she would in a dream. The way she never did. He feels real enough – she traces the lines around his eyes and the angles of his face with her fingers, guided by the curve of his mouth and the quiet question in his eyes.

“I am now,” she says.

He lies down on his back beside her, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder, the fabric of his suit a gentle rasp against her skin. She lifts her bare feet and settles them over his trainers, the worn canvas damp under her arches and heels. She shivers, and he takes her hand, curling his fingers through hers. “You’ve been traveling a long time,” he says.

She smiles. “Not as long as you.”

“You must be tired.”

“Not as tired as you.”

He rolls onto his side, leaning over her. He smoothes his palm along her naked collarbone, his fingers tracing the cool metal of the TARDIS key before slipping to her throat. Her pulse. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “Rose, what if you never find me?”

An easy question. “Then I’ll keep looking,” she says. There is no doubt in her voice.

He frowns. “The concept of _never_ —”

“Is beyond me, thankfully.” She touches the hand at her throat, sliding her fingers over his. Looks up at his pale face, framed by a starless sky. “I can’t let this happen, Doctor. I won’t. I’ll look until I find you.”

He is silent for a long moment, watching her and their hands joined over her skin. “And after?” he says.

After. _After_ is forbidden territory – a distraction, and a temptation. All she lets herself see is the road beneath her feet. She strokes his knuckles with her thumb and feels him shiver. “Assuming we don’t die?” she says.

“Assuming we don’t die.”

“Then I’ll take a very long nap.” She gives him a wide, false grin. “In a bed, for once.”

“Rose—”

She stretches, cracking her toes and reaching her arms over her head. The wind rises around them, sighing through the tall grass. She eases away from him, his imagined heat and the line of his body, and closes her eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” she says.

If he answers, she does not hear him.

++

The next universe is a battlefield.

The sky is blood red, the clouds stained by the setting sun. Birds circle overhead, drawn by the smell. The ground is black under her feet, dark with rock and gunpowder, and she steps carefully around the fallen. Checks each body she passes for breath, or a pulse. She finds none.

She sees a wall in the distance, tall stone topped with barbed wire. The dead still grip their rifles, unfamiliar weapons that seem to belong to centuries past, though no century her universe has ever known. She touches her own weapon, the gun hidden beneath the hem of her jacket. She has thirty minutes before the jumper is recharged; until then she is trapped here. No man’s land.

In the distance, one of the dead shudders.

She runs to his side, her breath harsh and loud in the exposed silence. She kneels beside him, her hands brushing over his chest, his abdomen. Searching for injury. She touches his face, and he opens his eyes.

“If I’m dead,” the man says, “I must be in heaven.” He laughs, and the laugh turns to a wet, violent cough. He shakes under her hands.

“Don’t be stupid,” she says, her voice soft. “You’re not dead.” She pushes back his coat and sees the blood seeping through his shirt. Shot in the back, no exit wound. Not dead, but soon will be. He must see it in her eyes – he smiles, his teeth stained red.

“They say war is a woman, in the old stories. A maiden in black.” He reaches up and brushes a strand of hair from her face, smearing blood across her cheek. “Thought you’d be taller.”   

He doesn’t say any more. Ten minutes later he dies, gasping for breath.

She stays with him.

++

She steps out of war and into a swimming pool.

She resurfaces a moment later, choking on chlorinated water and squinting through the burn in her eyes. Her clothes are heavy, her shoes heavier, and she dogpaddles her way to the shallow end.

She finds herself standing knee-deep in a motel swimming pool at midnight, ringed by palm trees and rusting white lounge chairs. She can hear the distant hum of a motorway; the buildings around her are silent and still, their windows dark. She sloshes out of the pool, strips off her sodden clothes and wrings them dry. She walks nude across the concrete, spreading her trousers and shirt and jacket over nearby chairs.

When she’s done, she looks down at the still surface of the pool. She can see something like her reflection in the water, in the white lights below. She still has the man’s blood on her face. 

She leaps into the deep end at a run, landing with a loud splash that echoes in the night silence. The water is warm, heavy with the smell of chemicals and the day’s heat. She scrubs at her dirty hair, at the layers of dust and sand and street that settle over her skin with every new universe. She lets herself slip under and opens her eyes, stares into one of the circles of light that line the wall of the pool. An underwater moon, burning white in the clouded water. She squeezes her nose shut and holds her breath, bobbing cross-legged at the bottom until her lungs ache.

When she resurfaces, gasping, the Doctor is sitting by the side of the pool in his shirtsleeves, his bare feet dangling in the water.

She inhales some water through her nose and starts to cough.

“You’re not drowning, are you?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He smiles then, and loosens his tie. “Glad to hear it. I’d hate to have to jump in after you.”

She swims over to him, aware as she hadn’t been the night before of her nakedness. She grabs the pool edge beside him and hangs there, kicking idly. “So I’m hallucinating now, am I?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Maybe this is another dream. I really couldn’t say.”

“Couldn’t say, or won’t?”

He frowns at something over her head – the palm trees. “Aren’t you meant to be looking for me in London?”

“You may not have noticed, but this thing isn’t exactly predictable.” She pulls on his bare ankle – a strange, unimagined intimacy, the rolled cuffs of his trouser legs and the hair on his calves – and grins up at him. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

He reaches down and brushes a strand of hair from her face, his fingers cool against her cheek. “I should go.”

“Don’t.” She grips his knees and pulls herself up between them, arching out of the water. He cups her face in his hands, curls his body around her as her hands slide up his thighs, staining his trousers with pool water. “Stay a little longer,” she says, her voice rough. “If this is my dream—”

His nose bumps against hers, and she feels the heat of his breath against her mouth. “I’m the one asleep, this time.”

“Then don’t wake up.” Her lips touch his, briefly. “Not yet.”

“Rose,” he says, and he’s about to say something more when he overbalances, tipping forward into the pool with an enormous splash. He resurfaces, sputtering and rubbing his eyes.

She can barely breathe for laughing. “Your hair—” she gasps, but the rest is bubbles; he dunks her, his hands sliding down her slick shoulders. She kicks free, swims beneath him and grabs at his toes. Tickles the bottoms of his feet and grins as he squirms.

“—Going to get you for that,” she hears as she comes up for air. His arms twine around her, pushing her into shallower water, against the wall of the pool. Her hands slide up his chest, to the wet knot of his tie. They grin at each other, breathless.

“Oh no,” she says, deadpan. “Now you’ve got me.”

He laughs. “It seems I have.” She traces one finger along the line of his throat, following a bead of water as it slips under his collar. He swallows and his grin disappears, leaving an unreadable expression in its place. Under the water his fingers skim her ribs, the curve of her waist and the rise of her hips; she looks down and watches as he touches her, their skin strange and pale in the rippling light.   
     
She looks up and meets his eyes.

There is something like wonder in his face, an innocence at odds with the centuries she’s seen in his eyes and the sad twist at the corner of his mouth. She kisses him there, a light touch of lips, and feels his hesitation.

“It’s all right,” she whispers. “I know you’re not real.”

He smiles, his eyes dark. “Well,” he says, “at least one of us does.” His hand slips between her legs and holds her there, an even pressure of bone and muscle and skin that makes her arch into him, her fingernails catching in the sodden fabric of his shirt. She gasps, and he kisses her carefully, his lips cold and slightly parted.

He tastes like chlorine, like sweet-green grass and open plains. She forces the kiss into something harder, something bruising, and with a low sound he pulls her closer, pushes her against the wall. He slips one finger inside her, and the callus on the pad of his thumb finds her clit.  
   
“Jesus _Christ_ ,” she says, and then they both start to laugh, snickering into each other’s mouths. She rocks hard down into his hand, still laughing, and he kisses her jaw, the tendons of her neck. She feels his teeth, the slow touch of his tongue, and she shudders.

Then a car backfires in the distance and she’s on the edge of the pool, her arm outstretched as she reaches for the gun hidden under her jacket.

There’s a silence; she stays crouched on the concrete, dripping and naked. She doesn’t let herself look at his face.

“It was only a car,” he says.

She stands, rubbing the water away from her mouth and nose. Her eyes are still fixed on her gun. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

She hears him climb out of the water, the soft squelch of his trousers and the wet sound as his tie falls to the concrete. Hears his footsteps, the rustle of his dry suit jacket as he holds it out to her. “You think I don’t understand,” he says. “I do.”

He’s too thin; when she pulls the coat around her it covers her breasts and her stomach and not much else. She sits on a lounge chair, her knees tucked together and her arms held close inside the spare warmth of the jacket. She looks up at him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He nods. His hair is slicked to his head, his shirt and trousers dark with water. He sits beside her, his shoulder not quite touching hers. “Okay,” he says. “We won’t.”

They sit like that for a long time.

This universe has few stars left, and she watches them closely. They’re paled by the harsh lights of the city, dim with distance, but she finds comfort in them nonetheless. Comfort, and purpose.

“I watched a man die today,” she says.

The Doctor looks down, his mouth a thin line. “I’m sorry.”

She smiles at the stars. “You’re always apologising for things that aren’t your fault, but you never say a word about the things that are.” She stands, slipping his jacket from her shoulders and dropping it into his hands. Her drying hair curls into her eyes, and she brushes it back. “You fought in a war, once.”

He looks away. “I did.”

“You were a soldier.” She touches his chin, turning his face back to hers. “Did you carry a gun?”

He weighs the question carefully, and she can see in his eyes the brief moment when he considers the obvious lie. The moment passes. “Yes,” he says. “And worse things.”

She nods, bends and touches her forehead to his. Together, their eyes close. “You were right,” she says. “I am tired.”

When she opens her eyes, he’s gone.

She dresses slowly – bra and knickers, watch, trousers, shirt and shoes. Her gun in its holster and the smooth sleeves of her jacket, shining like armour in the pool light. The gate swings open under her hand and she walks east, out of the motel parking lot and into the sunrise. 


	2. Chapter 2

Old habits are hard to break.

She searches for the Doctor, and she does not, cannot forget him – he is her Grail, the hope waiting on the horizon. The journey’s end. She does not forget him, but in her travels she stumbles upon revolutions and rebellions, invasions and injustices, and she’s never known how to stand idly by. She helps those she can.

She does not give them her name.

They find their own names for her, some silly, some strange. A small underground resistance in Dalek-occupied New York calls her the Terminator for obvious, American reasons; they name the gun after her, too, the gun that can spilt a Dalek in half at close range, the gun she helps them design. In a postwar Paris they call her _La louve_ , and when she asks for a translation the answer makes her grin until her teeth ache. What she does for them she does under the cover of dark, in silence, and though come morning the blood on her hands is any colour but red, it is blood nonetheless.

_La louve victorieuse_ , they call her, smiling around the fear in their voices. Buy her a drink, they say. It is the least we can do.

Torchwood, when it exists, calls her Unidentified #47, the target, or _that bitch_. In one universe a little group called LINDA builds a website where people all over the world can share their sightings of the Mysterious Woman in Blue – the MWB, as they call her. She stops by Elton’s flat for a friendly cup of tea and a brief, pointed chat; the next day the website comes down and Elton finally takes Ursula to the Golden Lotus for a Chinese.

When she works for UNIT, they call her _ma’am_.

++

Her first steps in Donna’s world almost send her headfirst into a telephone pole.

She stumbles off the kerb into an empty street, still clutching the yellow paper flyer she tore from the pole as she fell. It is a winter night in London, Christmas decorations hanging in the shop windows, and in the distance she hears screams. There’s a sound like the firing of a military tank, and the ground shudders.  
    
“Typical,” she says, and smoothes the wrinkles from the flyer in her hand, hoping to learn the year. It’s an advert for the New Year’s show at a nearby jazz club, a list of featured bands decorated with cheesy clip art. At the bottom of the page is a full moon circled by clouds, and beside it is the name of the headlining band: _Bad Wolf_. 

She looks east, to the end of the street. Two men in familiar uniforms lift a trolley into the back of an ambulance – a stretcher covered by a long white sheet.

She runs.

++

It’s nearly dawn by the time she sees the body.

The walls of Albion Hospital rise like ghosts around her, an echo of the past in brick and plaster and paint. She hears Jack’s voice in her ear as she slips past the UNIT guards, feels the whisper of worn leather against her wrist as she follows the stone staircase down to the basement. To the morgue.

The room is dark, windowless but for the glass door leading to the florescent-lit corridor. She sits on a stool beside the body, her hands clasped in her lap. Her knuckles are sharp against her skin, white as bone, and when she exhales she sees her breath hover in the air like smoke.

He doesn’t look like a man who drowned.

His suit is stained by the water of the Thames, by the smell, but his face – she’s seen what happens to the bodies of those who die in shipwrecks and at sea, and his face is impossibly smooth and unspoiled. Lifelike. The illusion holds until she touches his hand, slowly eases her fingers over his and feels the stillness, the bone-deep absence of the dead.

She hears footsteps in the corridor outside. She doesn’t move.

“I will have the _head_ ,” a man’s voice says, “of any doctor who has so much as lifted a scalpel, do you hear me? Short though certain men’s memories may be, the Doctor was once one of our own and I will not see him treated like a damned science experiment.”

“With all due respect, Sir Alistair,” a younger, reedier voice says, “the knowledge that could be gained from even a minimally invasive autopsy—”

A tall, thick-set man stops in front of the glass door, his silhouette swallowing the light from the corridor. “ _Dissection_ , Major. Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? You want to slice him open and see what makes him tick. Well, I won’t allow it.” He opens the door, and a sliver of light falls across her cheek. He pauses briefly, then turns back to the corridor. “You are dismissed.” 

“Brigadier—”

“You do not wish me to repeat myself, Major, I assure you. I can become most unpleasant when irritated.” He steps into the morgue and closes the door firmly behind him. They wait in silence as the Major’s footsteps fade away. When he’s gone, the man switches on the light.

He’s older than she’d guessed, misled by the smooth roll of his voice and the military precision of his posture. He wears wool trousers, a red jumper, and a heavy, practical-looking brown coat; he looks as if he dressed hastily, in the dark. His gaze falls to the Doctor’s hand, to her fingers curled around his. He gives her a grim smile.

“Miss Tyler.”

Her mouth is dry; she licks her lips. “You aren’t meant to know my name.”

“There’s a photograph in your file. Doesn’t quite do you justice, if you don’t mind me saying so.” For a moment he seems to consider offering her his hand; the body lies between them, and his hand stays at his side. “My name is Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. I was a friend of the Doctor’s.”

He waits for her to say something. She doesn’t.

The Brigadier clears his throat, politely. “You’ve changed a great deal since you traveled with him. We, of course, thought you were dead.” 

It takes her a moment to remember; when she does, she meets his eyes. “Canary Wharf.”   

“Quite.” He takes a step forward and looks down at the body, leaning on his cane. His grief fits easily in the lines of his face, the wrinkles of his mouth and eyes. “He was very young, this time,” he says softly. “Very young.”

The Doctor’s hand is heavy in hers, pinning her to the table, and she watches as the tips of her fingers turn white and bloodless. Numb. “I came here to steal the body,” she says. “And the TARDIS, if you have it.”

He nods, unsurprised. “They’re recovering it from beneath the Thames now. It should arrive within the hour.” He pauses. “He left instructions, years ago. For what was to be done with his remains if something should befall him in the line of duty and he was unable to regenerate.”

Her grip tightens. “What instructions?”

The Brigadier smiles, his eyes warm with sudden amusement. “He wished to be cremated, and to have his ashes dispersed over a gravel quarry.”

She looks down at the Doctor’s face. “A gravel quarry.”

“His idea of a joke, I suppose. Nevertheless, I’d—” He stops, and his expression turns solemn.  “I’d be honoured to carry out his wishes, if you’d allow me.”

She nods, once. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I think he’d like that.” She stands, gently sliding her fingers free. Her gaze is still fixed on the Doctor, his chapped lips and the blue-pale skin under his eyes. She lifts the sheet again and lets it cover his face, and as she does something hardens inside her, something a little like resolve and a little more like the stone-faced fury of those left behind. “Brigadier,” she says, “how much do you know about parallel universes?”

“More than the layman, I suspect, but it’s not exactly my area of specialty.” He gives her a wary look. “Why do you ask?”

“I have a theory I’m working on. It’s still in the early stages, but I think—” She pauses, and a ghost of an icy smile touches her lips. “I think I’ll just make it up as I go along.”

The Brigadier tucks one hand in his pocket and leans on his cane with the other. “I once knew a chap who went off half-cocked like that. Always needed me to swoop in at the last moment and save the day.” He steps forward and presses a white business card into her palm, blank but for a single telephone number. “If you should need any assistance of that nature, I’d be happy to oblige.” 

She tucks the card into her pocket. “Thank you, Brigadier.”

“You are most certainly welcome.” He waits until she’s at the door before he says, “Oh, and Miss Tyler?”

She turns. “Yes?”

“As I’m sure you understand, it would be a considerable breach of security if I were to tell you that the TARDIS will be kept on level five of this facility, and that the guards on that floor will be unexpectedly called away precisely five minutes after its arrival there.” He steps forward and holds the door open for her as she leaves the room. “It isn’t my habit to reveal sensitive information to complete strangers, you see, particularly when I never spoke to them in the first place.” He gives her a deliberate wink and disappears down the corridor, his cane swinging.

She touches the shape of the card in her pocket, smiling as she fades into the shadows.

++

Five minutes after a team of UNIT soldiers pushes the TARDIS into an empty room on the fifth floor, she lifts the chain from around her neck and slides the key she wears into its lock. The door opens with a soft snick, and she steps inside.

The console room is dim, the air still and hazy with dust. She closes the door behind her and climbs the steps, her eyes tracing each curve and long-forgotten line. She touches the time rotor, fingertips sliding over cool glass, and the room flares green.

“This is Emergency Programme One,” his voice says from behind her. She turns and sees the brittle recorded image, a projection from a light on the console. He looks young, younger than he does in her dreams, his suit crisp and his eyes bright. Her throat burns with rising memories, wisp-thin echoes of this voice and this face – his head at that angle, his eyes shining with that heat. He steps towards her, his hands in his pockets.

“Rose, you know what’s happened and why you’re watching this. The TARDIS is taking you home, and—” He smiles, a sad twist at the corner of his mouth. “And I don’t expect you to stay there. The TARDIS will help you as much as she can, whatever you choose, wherever you go – on one condition.” He moves closer, his face flickering before hers. “I don’t believe in prophesy and I don’t believe in fate, and whatever was trapped in the heart of that planet, it certainly wasn’t the Devil. It was a monster just like all the other monsters, and it lied.” His voice turns hard. “But if it didn’t, I’m going to die in your place. There will be no discussions about this, no arguments and no apologies. I will die, and you will let me.”

Her fists clench, and she’s opening her mouth to speak when he touches her face, his thumb brushing her lips like a sigh.

“I’ll tell you,” he says, the words almost too soft for her to hear. “I promise, Rose. Before I go, I’ll tell you everything.”

His image fades, and she’s alone.

When she opens the TARDIS door, the Powell Estate towers above her, a grey blur in the early morning rain. Instinctively she looks for her flat, for her mum’s silhouette in the window. The windows are dark, and all the flats look the same. She lets the door swing closed.

That night she sleeps under the console, curled among the wires. She does not dream.

++

Three weeks later she’s walking back from the shop, a carton of milk in one hand and a package of biscuits in the other. She’s watching her feet as she walks, feeling the stones of the street through the worn soles of her shoes, and when she looks up she sees him leaning against the door of the TARDIS. Waiting.

It’s the first time she’s dreamt of him while standing in sunlight. She stops a few feet short of the door, squeezing the package of biscuits until the plastic crackles.

“Your suit is blue,” she says. “I never noticed.”

He shrugs. “I don’t see how it matters. If I’m not real, neither is my suit.” He nods in the direction of the biscuits. “Were you planning to share those?”

“I wasn’t, no.”

He grins, and she knows what he’s going to say next. “My TARDIS, my biscuits.”

“It’s not your TARDIS anymore,” she says. “You’re dead.” She pushes past him, unlocks the door and closes it behind her with a neat snap. She stomps up the stairs, and when she reaches the top he’s already standing at the console, slipping on his glasses as he fiddles with the monitor.

He frowns. “You’ve been following Donna.”

She drops the milk and biscuits onto the jumpseat. “Well, you’ve been cremated and scattered over a rock quarry in Wales. Want to brew a cuppa and swap stories?”

He straightens, taking off his glasses. “How could you possibly even know about Donna? She’s—”

“The point of divergence between this universe and ours? Yeah, I’ve noticed.” She taps twice at a button below the monitor, bringing up a series of graphs and diagrams she’s only just taught herself how to read. She folds her arms across her chest. “You see, this universe isn’t parallel at all – it’s purely artificial, a twisted branch force-grown from the stem of our own universe. Somehow something that shouldn’t have been changed was, and now this new branch is feeding off our timeline, sucking it dry.”

“Bit of a dodgy metaphor,” he murmurs, putting his glasses back on and leaning in for a look.

“Shut up.” She taps the button again, and another set of diagrams flashes across the monitor. “The moment of intervention was Monday, 25th November at one minute past ten in the morning. It took place on Little Sutton Street, Chiswick, London, England, not two blocks from the house where Donna lives with her mother and grandfather.” She smiles grimly. “However she managed it, Donna Noble is quite literally the center of this universe.”

He looks up at her, his forehead wrinkled in disbelief. “You can’t think she did it on purpose.”

“No,” she says. “I think she’s one of us.” She switches off the monitor and stands back, watching him with cold eyes. Her heart settles like a stone in her chest. “She was meant to be with you that night under the Thames, wasn’t she?”

He removes his glasses and slips them slowly into his pocket. Then he stands there, the fingers of one hand curled around the curve of the console, his face closed and his shoulders wire tense. He doesn’t look at her. “We’re not going to talk about that,” he says, and the stinging finality in his voice sends a tremor through her stillness, web-thin cracks spreading along the ice.

Her fingers curl into fists. “Oh,” she says through her teeth. “ _Aren’t we_.”

She slams her hand down on the large blue button beneath the monitor, and a projection flickers to life beside her. It slides its hands into the pockets of its brown pinstripe trousers and says,  “This is Emergency Programme One. Rose, you know what’s happened and why you’re watching this. The TARDIS is taking you home—”

The Doctor _(the real Doctor, the hallucination, the dream)_ reaches past her to shut it off, but she shoves him away, hits the blue button again and watches stone-faced as another projection appears beside the first. “This is Emergency Programme One,” the man in the leather coat says, his dear features faded and grey. “Rose, now listen, this is important—”

“That’s enough,” the Doctor snaps, but she punches the button again and again, filling the console room with the flickering ghosts of men she never knew, their unfamiliar faces strained with a too-familiar solemnity as they explain that they are dead, and that they are not to be mourned. Their voices jumble together, a rising cacophony of names and halting, pained goodbyes _(“Oh, Ace,” says a small man in a Panama hat, a soft catch in his voice)_ and the Doctor slumps against the curve of a coral strut, his eyes haunted. Before him a wild-haired man with a Cheshire Cat grin offers a white paper sack to the empty air, rambling happily as an older Doctor with a sweet, funny face says nothing at all, his hand held simply over his left heart.

Minutes pass and the recordings blink out one by one, their messages ended. Her first Doctor lingers longest, his gaze holding hers until the last ghost disappears. Then he fades like the others, and they’re alone again.

The Doctor slides down the strut to the grated floor, his mouth a thin, furious line. “I wonder,” he says, “if you even know what you’re punishing me for.”

She walks over and sits beside him, hugging her knees to her chest. When she speaks her voice is deadly calm. “I saw the UNIT incident report.”

“I only remember what happened in the original timeline, Rose. Without Donna there—”

“You didn’t leave. You could’ve, but you didn’t.” She turns and looks at him. “You let yourself die.”

He nods slowly, his eyes faraway. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I believe I would have.”

It’s not the first time she’s cried since that morning in Norway, but it feels as if it is – as if in the years since she lost him she forgot how, and now she has to relearn the knife-sharp pain at the center of her chest, the burn in her eyes as the tears slip free. She fights the sound, the quiet sob wedged like ice in the back of her throat, and she chokes on it. She cries.

The Doctor reaches for her, his cool hand sliding to the back of her neck, but she pushes him away. Staggers to her feet and rips down the purple shirt hanging above their heads, the shirt she hasn’t worn since the day before Canary Wharf – since a quick change in the console room and a shirt tossed carelessly over the branch of nearby strut. She hasn’t worn it in years; it feels new in her hands.  
     
She throws the shirt at his chest and he catches it, fumbling. “No,” he says, “no, it’s not – you don’t understand—”

“I asked you. I stood on that beach and I said, _What are you going to do?_ ” She inhales a ragged breath. “I asked you, and you _smiled_.”  

He rises and grabs her hands, trapping them between his own. “Rose, please—”

“How long did you wait? A day? Two?” She tears her hands free and laughs, the sound so harsh her throat aches with it. “You must have been so relieved – finally alone, and no one left to stop you.” She turns and slams her hand hard against the console. “No one left to listen to your stupid, _fucking_ goodbyes.”

A light blinks on the console and his image appears beside her, a figure of wavering light and shadow. She watches the angles of his profile, the simple longing in his eyes as his outstretched hand caresses a face that isn’t there, his fingers reaching into empty space. “I’ll tell you,” he says. “I promise, Rose. Before I go, I’ll tell you everything.”

The image fades, and the Doctor stands behind her.

“I would,” he says. “If you’d let me.”

For the first time in weeks she stops and feels herself breathe. Hears her heartbeat in the silence. She wipes the tears from her face with the back of her hand and remembers the open plains of the empty Earth, the starless sky and the moon in the east. She closes her eyes. “I’m going to fix this,” she says  through the thickness in her throat. “I’m going to take the TARDIS back to that day on Little Sutton Street and make sure that this never happens.”

She feels his hesitation in the moment before he touches her, brushes her hair aside and tucks his face against the curve of her neck. He breathes into her skin. “I don’t want to die, Rose.”

Her face crumples. “Liar.”

He slides his hands to her shoulders and gently turns her to face him. “Look at me,” he says. “Please.”

She can’t. She turns away, her eyes still closed. “You should go,” she says, her voice thin. “I’m sorry. I’m too tired to imagine you right now.”

She feels his hands slip from her shoulders, and a moment later the silence changes. She’s alone.

She turns back to the console and begins the long, complex process of calculating the coordinates for a trip in both space and time. When she looks to the monitor for guidance she sees a vivid yellow Post-It stuck to the screen. She rips it free and reads the sharp string of words written in the Doctor’s unmistakable angled script: _Christmas Day, London, 2007. 8:34 AM. Wherever you are, Rose, don’t be there._  
  
She shoves the note into her pocket and returns to her calculations.

++

Two hours later she steps out of the TARDIS onto Little Sutton Street on Monday, 25th November at quarter ‘til ten in the morning. It’s sunny, unseasonably warm, and for a moment she lets herself tilt her head back and feel the sunlight on her face. Listens to the hum of traffic and the simple neighborhood sounds around her.

_It’s almost over_ , she tells herself. _I’m almost home._  

A blue car rolls up to the intersection, its turn signal blinking left. Donna Noble and her mother sit inside, arguing – she can’t hear what they’re saying, but she hardly needs to. She’s had that fight a hundred times, a thousand, and she smiles through the sharp sting of nostalgia. Donna’s mum – Sylvia, her name was – points right, emphatically, and says something that makes Donna flinch. The hurt is subtle, quickly hidden, but it lingers. Donna’s grip on the steering wheel tightens.

She doesn’t need to look at her watch to know that this is the moment, this is the choice. It’s as simple as a turn to the right or a turn to the left, and she’d laugh but it’s one minute after ten in the morning and she still doesn’t know which direction Donna’s meant to choose.  

Sylvia says something else, something bitter, and the stubborn line of Donna’s mouth wavers. She looks down, and the turn signal begins to blink right.

In the distance, there’s a screech of brakes. A woman screams.

Instinct sends her into a full-out run, her thin-soled shoes beating against the pavement. She sees the lorry stopped in the middle of the street, the gathering crowd. The driver, his hands covering his face. Behind them, the traffic stops.

Donna Noble lies in the road, dying.

She looks older than the woman sitting three blocks away in her car, worn by exhaustion and pale with pain. There are wires sewn into her drab brown coat, strange and seemingly pointless, but the silver watch on Donna’s wrist is the one Mickey made for Rose’s 25th birthday, the same watch Rose wears now. She slips her fingers into her sleeve and touches it, her heart in her throat.

She’ll send Donna here to die. She’ll send her here with a watch, a coat full of silly wires and a simple task _(turn left)_ and she’ll know all along how it ends. She’ll know because she stands here now, watching as Donna’s breath slows.

She’ll send Donna here to die, because she already has.

Donna is quiet, her eyes half-lidded and her breath shallow. Rose slips free of the crowd and kneels beside her, settles her hands on either side of Donna’s head and leans close. _It worked_ , she wants to say. _You saved him._ She wants to say, _I’m sorry._

“Tell him this,” she says. “Two words.”

She whispers her name in Donna Noble’s ear.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s Christmas in London again.

She jumps into the city just after sunset, the air biting cold through the thin protection of her jacket. The streets are deserted – eerily so, for Christmas Eve. No late-night shoppers, no parties. Her hand wanders to the paper crinkle of the Doctor’s warning in her pocket – _Christmas Day, London, 2007. 8:34 AM. Wherever you are, Rose, don’t be there._

She smiles. You’d think that, being a figment of her imagination, he’d know her a little better.

She wanders the streets for hours in almost perfect silence, her footsteps muffled against the concrete. The occasional car or lorry passes through the stillness, but for most of the minutes in most of the hours she’s alone. The wind grows colder, and her fingers and nose go numb. There isn’t a catastrophe in sight. 

Then she turns a corner and nearly frightens a man into cardiac arrest.

She helps him to the front steps of the nearest shop and he sits, mopping his forehead with a red handkerchief from his suit pocket. “I’m so sorry, my dear,” he says, laughing a little. “It’s silly, I know, but for a moment I thought you were a human being. Frightened me half to death.” He tucks the handkerchief back into its pocket and straightens his bowtie. “They’re quite savage, you see – particularly so during their Festival of Lights.”

She pauses, absorbing this. “I think,” she says slowly, “that Hanukkah was a few weeks ago.” 

The man pushes himself to his feet, brushing the dust from his trousers. “Ah, but the Menorah they burn – _Menorah_ being the plural of the human word _Men_ , of course – are displayed in the windows of the humans’ houses for some time afterward. It’s a gruesome practice, but the truly fascinating thing is that these Menorah continue to burn even after all their oils are gone. It’s something of a miracle.”

“A miracle,” she says, fighting a grin. “Right.”

The man gives her a knowing look. “A few too many glasses of Earth champagne at the buffet, hmm?” When she nods, he pats her hand. “You’re hardly the first. Let’s get you back to the group, shall we?” He pauses, looking down at her wrist. “Dear me. Have you lost your teleport bracelet?”

She tries to look remorseful and very, very drunk. “I tripped, and it fell down one of those grate thingies in the street.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I’m really sorry.”

“Now, now, no need to worry.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver bracelet with a shining blue dial. He slips it onto her wrist. “This is precisely why I always carry a spare.”

The friendly alien in the bowtie leads her a block north, where a small group of elegantly dressed people are engaged in a rather heated debate over the function of a pair of rubbish bins. The alien in the bowtie cheerfully explains that they are used to store weapons, and occasionally severed limbs; as he talks she slips into the group as subtly as she can, coming to stand beside a small, spiky red man in a tuxedo. He winks at her, and she winks back.

“Nice tux,” she says.

“Nice breasts,” he replies.

Then the street shimmers blue around them, and they’re standing in an Edwardian ballroom. Or, judging by the view, an Edwardian ballroom in space. 

“Huh,” she says. “Cool.”

The alien in the bowtie stands behind a podium, fiddling with dials. “Just a small problem with the teleport system,” he says, frowning. “If I could have your bracelets—”

A man in an official-looking uniform comes striding toward them, a few flunkies following in his wake. “My apologies, ladies and gentlemen and Bannakaffalatta, we seem to have suffered a power fluctuation,” he says, his smile slightly forced. “On behalf of Max Capricorn Cruise Lines I thank you for your patience, and if you’d like to return to the festivities, free drinks will be provided.”

The words _free drinks_ inspire the predictable reaction in her fellow tour takers, and they toddle off towards the nearest bar. She lingers, her eyes fixed on the wide glass of the windows. On the sight of the Earth, blue and white below.

He asked her to stay out of London; he didn’t say a word about being in orbit above it.

 She turns on her heel, catches the man in uniform’s arm and gives him her best disarming grin. “Hello,” she says, “I’m drunk and this question is really just an excuse to flirt with an attractive man in a rather dashing hat, but I’ll ask it anyway.” She leans in close and flutters her eyelashes. “What sort of power fluctuation are we talking about, exactly?”

++

“What kind of _moron_ ,” she says through gritted teeth, “names a spaceship after the Titanic?”

Midshipman Frame looks up from the bandage he’s making from his uniform jacket. He has her blood smeared across his face. “Why?” he says. “Is it famous?”

She lets her head fall back against the wall of the bridge and presses her hands harder against the gunshot wound in her side. “Check the engines again.”

He holds up the bandage. “But—”

“I’m fine. Check the engines.” She glares at him until he relents, sets the long strips of ripped fabric on the floor and returns to the helm. As soon as his back is turned she lets the pain show in her face. It hurts like a bitch, but the shot was clean – if she can get to a hospital before she bleeds out, she’ll survive with a few stitches and a rather impressive scar.

The only trouble, of course, is that the nearest hospital is 300 miles below on a planet about to be nuked by a deorbiting cruise liner.

Her eyes stray to the captain, to where his body lies sprawled by the door, two neat bullet holes in the center of his chest. Most of the body is obscured by debris that fell during the impact; she stares at the worn places on the bottom of his shoes.

“You saved my life,” Midshipman Frame says, his voice soft. He taps at the screen on the helm. “If you hadn’t—”

She closes her eyes. “Killed him?”

“This is his fault,” he says. His voice breaks, and she wonders not for the first time just how old he is. She knows he’s looking at the life-signs detector – the last of the readings blinked out ten minutes ago, just before the Heavenly Host arrived at the door and nearly decapitated her with a halo. They’d been forced to deadlock-seal themselves into the bridge, though it hardly matters – there’s no one left to come for them. “All those people,” he says. “He killed them for money.”

She shakes her head, her jaw tight with pain. “Killing is killing. Reasons aren’t as important as you’d think.” She opens her eyes. “How much longer until we lose the engines?”

He swallows. “Not long. They’re cycling down again.” The ship shudders, and they both look up, tensed for another collapse. The ceiling holds. “There’s nothing we can do,” he says. “We’re losing orbit.”

She pushes herself to her feet, and the pain flares white behind her eyes. She laughs through the agony in her side, a strange little chuckle that shudders through her like a fever. His eyes go wide _(wider)_ and he reaches for her.

“You shouldn’t—”

She holds up a blood-slick hand. “I told you, I’m fine.” She supports herself on the control display and joins him at the helm. Looks closely into his face and sees the fear there. The fear, and the slow acceptance of what’s to come. “Midshipman Frame—” She pauses. “Sorry, no. What’s your first name?”

“Alonso.”

She grins and takes his hand in hers. Behind them, the Earth fills the view screen. “Alonso, do you trust me?”

“Yes,” he says without a moment’s hesitation, and _oh_ , she remembers being that young. She squeezes his hand.

“Then I need you to jettison the ship’s nuclear storm drive before we hit the planet.”

He stares at her. “I couldn’t – I mean, not all of it, there’s not enough time—”

“As much as you can.” She gives him a broken smile. “It’s the difference between wiping out a single city and destroying every living thing on that planet. It’s billions of lives.”

He lowers his head. “And we’ll die.”

“No,” she says gently. “I’ll leave you here and return to the planet.” He looks up, shocked, and she touches his cheek. “My jumper will only take one. I would—” She stops. Her throat tightens. “I would give anything to be able to stay in your place. I can’t.”

He shakes his head, but he doesn’t pull away from her. “I don’t understand.”

“Something happened, Alonso, something that corrupted your timeline and the timelines of everyone else in this universe. A man was supposed to be on this ship tonight, and because he wasn’t everything’s gone wrong.” The muscles in her side spasm, and he catches her just before she crumples to the floor. She grabs the helm and holds herself upright. “There’s a woman down on that planet, a woman called Donna Noble. If she dies, the universe we were meant to have will be gone forever. I have to be there to help her. If I’m not—” 

He turns away from her, and for a brief, terrible moment she thinks – and then his fingers fly over the screen, bringing up the engine controls. He types in a command. “In this other timeline, the one we’re meant to have.” He looks up and meets her eyes. “Do I die?”

For a moment, she considers the obvious lie. The moment passes. “Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know.”

He nods and taps once at the screen. The ship screams – the shriek of warning sirens and the banshee cry of metal against metal as the Titanic tears itself apart around them. The bridge tips violently to one side, sending them sprawling across the floor, and she bites down hard on her shout of pain. She can feel the moment when the molten core of the storm drive escapes into open space, the ship’s sudden shudder of loss. The room rattles around them, and the glass of the view screen cracks.

Alonso grabs for her hand. “You have to go.”

“No,” she says, tasting blood. “I can’t, not yet—”

The ship’s hull bursts into flame, and the bridge glows red with the light of the fires. They’ve entered the atmosphere. He crawls toward her, the floor shaking beneath them. “Listen,” he says, his voice oddly steady. “Listen, I—” He frowns. “You never told me your name.”

“I have a lot of names,” she says. She smiles, and her eyes sting. “You can call me Rose.”

“Rose,” he says, trying out the sound of it. “That’s a funny name.” 

“Oi,” she says, punching his arm. “Watch it, _Alonso_.”

He smiles back at her for a moment, his eyes bright. Then, slowly, his smile fades. “Rose, how many people are going to die?”

She kisses him, a brief, fierce press of lips to his forehead. “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t think about that.” She can hear the wind outside the ship, can see the blue sky beyond the glass. It’s dawn over London, and she’s run out of time. She slips her hand into her trouser pocket, and her fingers close around the jumper. “I’ve got to go,” she says. Her voice cracks. “I promise—”

He shakes his head. “No need.” He grabs hold of the helm and pulls himself to his feet. He stands there, tall and steady in the early morning sun. “I’ll be all right.”

She closes her eyes, and the sunlight follows her into the dark. “Yeah,” she says. “You will.”

She pushes the button.

She falls hard onto a hill, the grass dry and winter-brittle under her hands. She gasps, clutching at the wound in her side, and when she lifts her head she sees it. The sudden, impossibly vivid flare of light on the horizon, almost beautiful in its intensity. The sound follows after, ripping through the air with a violence that shakes the ground. She presses her hand to her side and crawls back until she feels the solid wood of the TARDIS door behind her. She curls against it, blood seeping through her fingers, and she makes herself watch.

Over London, the cloud rises.

++   

There are so many empty places, now.

She seeks them out, these forbidden remnants of life before – far enough from the blast radius to stand intact, close enough to be poisoned by the fallout. These are the only places of her childhood that survive; the rest have burned. Her city has fallen to dust, and it lingers on in the clouds, in the earth, in the water. In lungs and skin and hair.

She breathes London in with every breath, but it doesn’t kill her. Not the way it should.

Not the way it kills the others.

She likes the sound of the rain. Decides to forget what it means and just listens, closes her eyes against the brief, brief quiet _(she’ll unmake this world with her bare hands if she has to, but first she’ll use them to bury its dead)_ and hears the soft patter of rain against a metal roof. She stands on an empty merry-go-round in an abandoned park, her hand on the muzzle of a painted wooden horse, and if she wishes hard enough she can almost hear the music.

“Rose,” he says. “Rose, can you hear me?”

She opens her eyes.

He’s standing in the rain, just beyond the shadowed shelter of the merry-go-round. The sky is grey, the sky and the houses and the streets, and in his blue suit and red trainers he seems the realest thing for miles. His hair is slicked to his forehead, and a single raindrop clings to the end of his nose.

She smiles at him, and he takes a step back.

“My gran brought me here when I was small,” she says. She touches the horse’s neck, feels the long, carved muscles beneath the paint. “I ate too much candyfloss and vomited all over her shoes.” She gives him a long look. “You should really get out of the rain.”

He takes a slow step up onto the merry-go-round, and the floorboards creak. He swallows, his throat working under his collar. “The radiation—”

“The TARDIS protects me as long as I don’t stray too far. I asked her not to, at first.” She looks over her shoulder to where his _(her)_ ship stands on the grass. “Stubborn.”  

“Rose—”

“You say my name too much.” She steps forward and hooks a finger into each of his trouser pockets. “Someone might hear you.”

He opens his mouth, and she can already see the shape of the word on his lips _(Rose, he says, like it means something, like it should)_ so she kisses him. Arches her back and takes his mouth with hers, a kiss like a bite like a curse, and she waits until his fingers brush her face before she pulls away.

“I haven’t slept since my body count hit the millions,” she says. “I might be a little loopy.”

And _oh_ , but that makes him angry. His mouth twists in an ugly way, an ugly angry way, and she likes it. Likes it a lot. She slips her hands fully into his pockets and pulls him towards her by the hips.

“Let me guess.” She smiles, showing teeth. “You’re going to say that this wasn’t my fault.”

“It _wasn’t._ ”

She releases him, suddenly, and walks a few steps backwards to the only carriage on the merry-go-round – an open air coach with a red velvet seat, pulled by two white wooden horses. A carriage fit for a queen. She hops inside and sits, stretching her legs along the wide seat. Her shoes stain the velvet with mud. “Do you know what I’ve been doing, these past few weeks?”

He shakes his head, his eyes dark. “No.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.” Her side twinges, and she presses her hand to the still-healing wound. Her fingers clench. “More than seven million people were exposed to lethal levels of radiation before they could be evacuated north. There isn’t a refugee hospital in the country that doesn’t need an extra pair of hands and a spade.” She gives him a wry look. “I borrowed the spade from a shed in the TARDIS. Hope you don’t mind.”  

He steps up onto the carriage, looming over her. “You’ve been punishing yourself.”

“I’ve been doing my part,” she says, her voice cold. “It’s not atonement if what you’ve done can never be forgiven.”

He leans close, and his hands grip the seat behind her. “What you’ve done, Rose Tyler, is save your species from extinction. Yes, millions died that day, and millions more will die of radiation poisoning and diet pills and car exhaust, but without you this world would be dust. All of its futures, all of the wonderful and horrible things humankind is meant to do – just gone.” He leans closer. “You saved the planet, Rose.”

Her mouth twists bitterly. “And myself.”

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to thank you for that.” 

She looks up at him. The rain falls hard against the roof, loud in the silence, and he waits.

“Hold on,” she says. “Did you say diet pills and car exhaust?”

He lifts her feet off the cushion and sits beside her, his elbows resting on his knees. “I shouldn’t tell you. You can’t stop it.” He pauses, looking down at the mud clinging to her shoes. His are clean. “Then again, you probably could. But you shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

He meets her eyes, and what she sees in his face makes her ache. “Because you might die,” he says. He means, _Because you want to._   

She holds his gaze. “I can’t die before I send Donna back to Little Sutton Street. It would be a paradox.”

The Doctor nods, his expression unreadable. “Yes,” he says. “Among other things.” He looks down at their shoes again, lifts the toe of his left trainer and presses down on the edge of her boot – a gentle pressure, almost a touch. She wiggles her toes at him, and he smiles slightly, like he can see through the leather to the foot beneath. His knee bumps hers.

“Did you know,” he says conversationally, “that Max Capricorn planned the destruction of the Titanic? Set up the whole thing – paid off the captain, programmed the Host to kill any survivors.” He stops, his head tilting to one side. “Which, if you think about, was sort of unnecessary, as he also planned for the ship to crash into the planet below and wipe out all life on Earth.” He turns and meets her gaze, his smile thin and bloodless. “He wanted his board of trustees charged with mass murder, you see.” 

She sits very still for a long moment. “So,” she says. “It was just business, then." 

He looks down at her hands. At the dark bruises of her knuckles and her broken nails. “I know, probably better than anyone, that nothing I can say will convince you that this wasn’t your fault." His eyes return to her face. "But maybe you should remember that he deserves some of the blame.”

She touches his wrist, slipping her fingers along the soft skin over his pulse. “I promise,” she says, “to consider the possibility.”

His skin is slightly damp, cool with rain and the winter chill in the air. Her thumb brushes the inside of his sleeve, the pale cotton and fine hairs beneath.

He only has one heartbeat.

She slides her hand inside his jacket; he lets her, sits back against the seat and watches with wary eyes as she undoes the buttons at the collar of his shirt. Her fingers touch skin, her palm settling over the place where his right heart should be. His breath quickens. “I don’t have an explanation,” he says.

She drags her fingernails lightly over his chest. “Good,” she says. “I don’t want one.”

His fingers brush her throat, curl to the back of her neck and pull her to him, to his mouth and a warm, open kiss. The heat of it spreads through her, spreads to her face and stomach and a strange, elated fizzle in fine nerves of her fingers and toes. For a moment she lets him lead, lets the subtle pressure of his fingertips against her skull guide each breath and tilt of her head, the soft, desperate sweep of his tongue against hers and the answering throb between her legs.

Then she pushes him back against the seat and straddles him, her knees on either side of his hips and her hands on his shoulders. Her fingers clench in the rough fabric of his suit, and he stares up at her, pupils blown wide. Breathing fast. 

“We’re, um.” He licks his lips. “Complicating things, slightly.”

“No kidding,” she says, and grinds down against him.

He groans wordlessly into her mouth, and she smiles at the feel of him, at the hard angles of his hips close and straining closer. He clutches at her waist, need like a light behind his eyes, and his fingers grip the wound in her side. She doubles over, pain blossoming through her stomach, and she cries out.

His hands snap away from her, and he goes perfectly still. 

She pants, breathless with pain. “Listen, it’s not—”

He holds up a finger, and she stops. He eases her to her feet, hands careful on her hips, and he stands. The carriage creaks beneath them, shifting under their weight.

With one pull, he lowers the zip of her jacket.

A brisk, clinical motion slides the jacket off her shoulders and down her arms. It hits the wood of the carriage floor with a soft sound, and then his hands are at the hem of her top. “Arms,” he says, and she lifts them instinctively. He removes her top with a single, smooth pull over her head, and then she stands before him in her bra, the white shock of the bandage just visible over the waistband of her trousers. 

His hand lingers there, just above the wound, just for a moment. Then he flicks free the snap and zip of her trousers, hooks his thumbs into the waist of her knickers and tugs the lot down to her boots. He stays at her feet, kneeling, his face level with the bandage. 

She looks down and sees what he sees – the stains of old blood on the cotton, the flecks of vivid red seeping through. Slowly he peels the bandage away, fingers gentle when the adhesive clings to her skin.

The wound is an angry, puckered red, half-healed in places and still raw in others. He stares, and the darkness shifts in his eyes. “You were shot.”

“Got between a suicidal spaceship captain and his helm.” She shivers, naked in the cold. She doesn’t try to cover herself. “Rookie mistake, yeah?”

He pulls his glasses from his pocket and slips them on. He inspects the wound, his breath hot against her stomach. “How many times have you used the TARDIS’ tissue regenerator?” She doesn’t answer, and his jaw clenches. “This injury has healed and been reopened at least five times. You _know_ the strain that puts on your system, not to mention the increased probability of infection—” He stops. Looks up and meets her eyes, and the fierce calm she sees in his face stops her breath in her throat. “Rose,” he says, “I think you should know that I would never forgive you.”

She remembers the dead weight of his hand in hers. The blue-pale skin under his eyes. “Likewise,” she says, and means it.

He stands, and the smallest of smiles quirks the corner of his mouth. “Fair enough.”

She takes the bandage from his hand and gingerly covers the wound again. When she looks back up at him, his eyes are wide and fixed on her breasts.

“Ah,” he says. “You seem to be naked again.”  

“Not quite.” She reaches behind her and unhooks her bra. It falls to the carriage floor. “Now I’m naked again.”

“Pedant,” he says, and kisses her. It’s a sweet kiss, and a gentle one. His hands chastely cup her face, and the frames of his glasses bump her nose.

She grins into his mouth, slides her hands down to his arse, and squeezes.  

A heartbeat later he returns the favour, almost lifting her onto the thigh he eases between her legs. His mouth drops to the curve of her throat, and she feels the merciless pull of teeth and lips and tongue as she grinds down against him, his rain-damp hair slick under her hands. She relishes the burning friction of suit against skin, the heat of his mouth and the slow thaw inside her as he grows hard against her hip. 

Suddenly he pulls away from her, and she nearly topples over. “Your shoes,” he says.

His face is flushed, his mouth slightly open as he pants for breath. She blinks at him, dazed. “What about them?”

“Well, you’re still wearing them, for starters.” He grins at her with a dangerous, familiar charm. “Really, Rose. And you the supposed expert on this nakedness nonsense.” He spins her and gently pushes her back onto the carriage seat, careful of her injured side. Her clothes lie in a crumpled pile behind him, but sure enough – she’s still wearing her socks and boots. He kneels between her bare legs, inspecting the zip at the side of her right boot. He smiles up at her. “This is a new angle for us, isn’t it?” He looks pointedly at the junction of her thighs. “I quite like it.”    

She leans back against the seat and covers her face with her hands, half-laughing, half-mortified. “I can’t believe you just said that.” 

“I can’t believe you’re blushing.” He tugs one boot off and then the other, leaving her in her socks. “I think we should leave these on, don’t you? It is a bit nippy.” He runs a hand along the back of her calf, presses a kiss to the inside of her knee and lingers there, inhaling deeply through his nose. “Mmm. Lovely.”

She clutches the cushion beneath her, fighting the instinctive movement of her hips. She swallows hard. “Doctor, did you just—”

His head jerks up, lips curved in a luminous smile. “You know, that’s the first time you’ve called me that.”

“Called you what?”

His palms slide along her thighs, slowly spreading her legs farther apart. “Doctor.”

She reaches down and tugs affectionately at a strand of his fringe. “Idiot,” she says. “What else would I call you?”

“Let’s see,” he says, and then her knees are hooked over his shoulders and his face is shockingly, almost unbearably close. He breathes her in, his cheek hot against her thigh, and she feels him smile. “Rose,” he says, “I don’t want to worry you, but you seem to have sprung a leak down here.” He lifts his head just far enough to meet her eyes and waggles his eyebrows at her. “I think you might need a Doctor.”

“Oh my god,” she gasps, laughing, “I will _kick_ you in the _head_ —”

Then he licks his way inside her, lips and tongue and the slightest touch of teeth and her mind becomes a beautiful blank, fizzing at the edges with the soft slide of the seat under her arse and the solid ridge of wood behind her head. Reality narrows to points of contact, to his hair damp against her skin and the sudden, slick pressure of his fingers inside her. Her vision blurs, like she’s spent too long staring into the sun and now all she can see is light, a light seared into her eyes like a brand. The rest of the world has burned away _(burned and burned and)_ she fumbles for something to hold on to, grasps at the seat cushion, at the wood behind her head. Another finger presses close inside her, and he sucks hard at her clit – breaking her open, exposing her to the air, to the dust. She feels it in waves, the pleasure and then the crash, and when she closes her eyes she sees the cloud rising in the distance. The empty night sky.

The darkness.

He grabs her hands, linking his fingers through hers. She looks down and sees him looking up, his mouth wet and red and his eyes dark. “Where did you go?” he says, his voice raw. “I was right here, where did you—”

She pulls him up by his hands, pulls him onto the seat and on top of her. She falls back, sheltered by the solid heat of his body, legs around his waist and fingers knotted in his suit jacket. Their foreheads touch, and their fast breaths warm the air between them. “Just stay,” she says. “Just like this, just for a moment, I _can’t_ —” 

He shifts, easing his hips away from hers, but she draws him desperately closer, her calves firm against his arse. He arches into her, gasping. “Rose,” he says, and that name, that _fucking name_ , she’ll never – “Rose,” he says, “I’m right here.”

She laughs a little, a twisted sound that catches in the back of her throat. She slides her fingers into his hair and kisses him, drawing his mouth slick and hot over hers. He rocks against her, his suit coarse against the delicate skin of her breasts and thighs, and he’s so hard that she aches with possibility, with the simple thought of him inside her. She ends the kiss. “We would never do this,” she says, breathing hard. “Not if it were real.”

He touches her mouth, and his fingers linger over the swell of her lower lip. “I wanted to. From the beginning, I wanted—” She catches his fingers with a gentle press of her teeth, sucks them inside her mouth and tastes herself on his skin. He groans, his hips stuttering against hers. “Rose, I _wanted_ —”

She releases his fingers, licking her lips. “You never would’ve.”

He smiles, and it breaks her heart. “I am now,” he says. It sounds like a promise.   

She swallows around the sudden dryness in her throat, turns her face to the dark flush of the seat and feels him go still above her. “You’re not,” she says. She closes her eyes. “You’re not even real.”

She’s alone, the rain-kissed air bitter against her bare skin. She holds her hands over her face and lies still, shivering, her legs splayed wide across the carriage seat. She’s wet, and the air skims her thighs like the fingers of a hand, clinical and cold. After a minute she sits, one hand over the bandage at her side, and looks down at the pile of clothing at her feet. Trousers, knickers, top and bra and boots. She reaches into the pile, into the pocket of her jacket, and pulls out a white business card – blank but for a single telephone number.

Her socks whisper against the wood as she walks past the carved stillness of the merry-go-round, past the gleam of gold paint and the flash of mirrors. The TARDIS waits for her just beyond the carousel canopy, blue against the grey horizon. She walks naked across the dead grass, her hair slick with rain, and when she reaches the door she lays her palm against the wood and smiles.

“Hey there, old girl,” she says. “We have a call to make.”

The Brigadier answers on the first ring.


	4. Chapter 4

Travelling has taught her a lot about human nature.

People – particularly human people, but other sorts as well – have certain ways of dealing with deprivation and disaster. After the blast, most everyone she met was dying or dead _(fingers clench around a spade that isn’t there, the wet give of the earth and gathering clouds overhead)_ and even those who had months, maybe years before they felt the effects of the radiation had an inescapable absence in their eyes. A numbness that inured them to the cold.

Her new co-workers at UNIT have different ways of coping.

“Coffee,” says Private Parish. He slouches in his chair and rests his heels on the edge of the break room table. “No doubt about it. I miss coffee the most.”

“Addict,” Private Ellis says, affection in the ironic tilt of her head. She takes a bite from her ration pack and swallows quickly, her lips pinched in disgust. “Tell you what, though. Give me a choice between the finest coffee in Brazil and a half-decent ham sandwich, and I know what I’d pick.”

Another soldier nods. “Ham sandwich,” he says. “Every time.”

Private Parish turns and looks up at her, smiling. “What about you, ma’am? What do you miss the most since the Blast?”

She knows the rules of the game. No mentions of the dead, nothing personal, nothing lost forever. Just trivialities that evoke a nostalgia for an easier life, the life before. Coffee, sandwiches, and scented soap. Telly, chips, and beans on toast.

It’s been so long since she led a normal life.

“Voice-activated phone menus,” she says. “Don’t know what I’ll do for fun without them.” She finishes her water ration with a single gulp, then turns and walks to the door, ignoring their baffled stares.

“Blimey,” she hears Private Ellis say as the door closes behind her. “What planet is _she_ from?”

Outside the warehouse the sky is dawn-pale, but inside the light towers burn brightly as the midday sun. They’ve worked through the night, and still the warehouse bustles with activity. She dodges a pair of soldiers hauling long strips of corrugated steel, and then nearly walks into another pushing a cart of carefully stacked mirrors.

“Careful, ma’am,” the private says as she leaps aside. “Don’t think any of us can afford the bad luck.”

“No kidding,” she mutters, and makes a beeline for the TARDIS. It stands in the middle of the warehouse, the still center in a frenzy of computers and construction. She steps carefully over the bundle of wires and slips through the open door into the dim light of the console room. The grated floor is littered with tools and open files, and she crouches at the top of the stairs, flipping through a few pages of complex diagrams and equations. She understands the theory behind about half of what she sees; she’s pretty sure the other half is wrong.

The room is too quiet.

“Malcolm?” she says. “I left you alone for five minutes. Have you already set yourself on fire?”

A head pops up from a hole in the floor, and Dr. Malcolm Taylor blinks at her through an absurdly large pair of magnifying goggles. “Only a little,” he says, lifting his arm so she can see the singe marks on the sleeve of his lab coat. “I put it out straight away, this time.”

She sits on the floor at the edge of the hole, folding her legs beneath her. “Malcolm, I looked at some of your recent equations—”

He waves his hand dismissively. “Rubbish, all of it. Forget you ever saw them.” He disappears back into the hole and crawls beneath the console. “I certainly have.”

“Why?” she asks, carefully keeping the apprehension from her voice. “Did you learn something new?”

“Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t. The answer would depend, I suppose, on your definition of _new_ , which—” There’s an echoing thunk from beneath the console, and he goes suddenly quiet. “Oh. _Oh_ , sweet mother Mary, that was my _thumb_.”

“Malcolm?”

After a brief, loud struggle with a bundle of wire, he reappears without the goggles, his graying hair a sweaty mess. He holds up his thumb. “Tell me the truth. Is it bad?”

She looks closely, frowning. “Bend it.” He does. She pokes it once, gently, and he winces. She sits back. “I think you’ll live.”

“You’re not just saying that to bolster my spirits?”

“Not my style.” She rests her chin on her hand and looks down into the pit of wires and mislaid tools. He’s got farther than she thought; she left him alone too long. “Malcolm—”

“What I’ve learnt is new to me,” he says, “but not, I think, new to you.” His wire-rimmed glasses slip down his nose, and he pushes them up again before meeting her eyes, his expression unusually grave. “You told us the TARDIS was dying, but it’s not, is it? That’s why all the diagnostics I run go strange – I thought the ship was surviving on low power because it didn’t have any power to spare.” He presses his lips together in a thin line. “I’ve been trying to mend something that doesn’t need mending.”

She swallows. “Yeah.”

He takes a step back, hurt. “You sent it into a dormant state before you let us inside. You don’t trust us.”

“I trust _you_ ,” she says, and to her surprise it feels like the truth. “I trust the Brigadier.”

He shakes his head, frowning. “If the TARDIS is working, if you can still use it to travel in time, why do you need us? Why don’t you just take Ms. Noble back to Little Sutton Street yourself?”

She sighs. “Because I’ve seen the moment of intervention, and there was only one of me there. Only one me, and only one TARDIS. Donna has to get there some other way, and she has to go alone.” She rubs her hand over her face, feeling the slow creep of exhaustion. “I can’t risk changing what I saw, Malcolm. There’s too much at stake.”

He gives her a faint smile. “That I understand.” He reaches up and pats her hand. “I won’t tell them,” he says. “You have my word.”

“Won’t tell who what?” Captain Erisa Magambo asks from the door. It takes every bit of self-control Rose possesses to keep from jumping. Her spine goes ramrod straight.

Malcolm gapes at Magambo, fish-like. “Captain! I, I mean _we_ , I mean _I_ didn’t see you there. I mean, obviously, because if I had I would’ve said hello.” He stops, then lifts his hand in a quick wave. “Hello!”

Rose turns and gives Magambo her second most harmless smile. “Good morning, Captain. Back on duty already?”

Magambo salutes. “Ma’am.” She folds her arms behind her back. “Never went off duty, actually. There was a problem with a shipment.”

Rose raises an eyebrow. “Highway bandits or angry mob?”

“Bandits, this time.” She leans against the doorframe, careful not to step fully inside. “Are we making progress with the machine?”

Malcolm makes a soft noise of protest, and Rose winces. “Please don’t call the TARDIS that,” she says. “It can hear you.”

Magambo gives her a sardonic look. “I’m sure it understands that I meant no disrespect.” She turns to Malcolm. “Dr. Taylor, what’s your status?” 

He wipes his glasses on the singed sleeve of his lab coat, avoiding her eyes. “Oh, everything’s coming along nicely. If the construction of the lodestone goes to plan we should be ready for testing in two days.”

Magambo nods. “Does that fit your timeline, ma’am?”

Rose shrugs. “It’s not my timeline, Captain – it’s Donna Noble’s. I’m jumping into Leeds tonight to check up on her. If she’s ready to hear what I have to say—”

“Quite.” There’s a sudden burst of sound from the warehouse outside, shouting and the hard percussion of soldiers’ boots against concrete. A corporal appears behind Magambo, breathing fast.

“Intruders, ma’am, at the north entrance,” he says. “We think it’s Torchwood.”

Rose pushes herself to her feet, her hand going to the gun at her hip. “Erisa, they can’t see the TARDIS. If they do—”

“I know.” Magambo turns to the corporal. “Detain the intruders and move them to the secondary site. Keep them away from this area.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He hurries off, shouting orders. Rose slams down the stairs to the door and pushes past Magambo.

“You said no one would know the TARDIS was here,” Rose says through her teeth. “You promised me this would be secure.”

Magambo follows her out into the madness of the warehouse. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but yours isn’t the only UNIT operation that might attract the interest of Torchwood’s rag tag team of lunatics.”

Rose stops walking and turns back to the other woman. “You think they’re here about the ATMOS deaths?”

“They do tend to involve themselves in these sorts of situations,” Magambo says. She frowns. “They seem to think they can help, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.”   

“Well, they’re in the wrong part of the world if they want to investigate ATMOS. Britain doesn’t even have one of their satellite factories.” Rose runs her hand roughly through her hair. _Diet pills and car exhaust_ , he’d said. First the Adipose and now ATMOS. She could’ve stopped this.

“I can stop this,” an American man shouts from the crowd of UNIT soldiers at the north entrance to the warehouse. He struggles against the men snapping restraints around his wrists. Rose can’t see his face; she moves closer. “Look,” the man says, “we don’t have time for this. Maybe if you morons had pulled your heads out of your collective asses a few months ago when it first came on the market—”

“Oh yes,” another intruder says drolly, “because that’s precisely the sort of delicately-worded argument needed to show them the error of their ways.”

“Sarcasm, Ianto,” a dark-haired woman says. “Not exactly helpful.” Her accent is Welsh and oddly familiar. Rose steps up to the crowd, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Hello there,” she says, smiling. “If you lot are Torchwood, I assume you’re here to steal something?”

Then the American turns towards her, and the smile drops off her face.

“It can’t be,” Captain Jack Harkness whispers, his eyes wide. “Your name was on the list of the dead.”

Rose turns to Magambo, hiding her shaking hands in her trouser pockets.  Her voice is steady. “I need an interrogation room. No cameras, no microphones, no interruptions.”

Magambo’s lips press together in a thin line. “Procedure would dictate—”

“I really don’t care, Captain. I want that room now.” She gives Jack a hard look. “Dead or not, I’ll shoot you if you say another word.”

Jack recovers from his astonishment long enough to give her a silent, ironic little bow; the other two intruders stare at him in open disbelief. “Now hold on just a minute,” the dark-haired woman begins, but Jack shakes his head. She stops, her mouth pursed in annoyance. 

“Wonderful,” the man called Ianto says with a genteel sigh. “More secrets.”  

Rose knows exactly how he feels.

++

They stare at each other across the empty break room table. His wrists are cuffed, resting on the table between them. Her arms are folded, her legs crossed neatly at the knee.

Jack is the first to break the silence. “You look different.”

“You don’t.”

“Well, you know what they say.” He smiles thinly. “The young at heart never grow old.”

She watches him from across the table, the familiar cut of his heavy coat and the solid squareness of his jaw. She looks at him and thinks it could’ve been only yesterday, strolling through the universe with the Doctor’s hand in her right and his in her left. Adoring and adored. “I thought you were dead,” she says.

She sees a brief flicker of emotion behind his eyes before his expression turns hard again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Mostly because he promised me you weren’t.” She reaches across the table and touches his hand. “I’ve missed you, Jack.”

He leans forward, his eyes as cold as she’s ever seen them. “Listen, sweetheart – whoever you are and whatever you’re doing here, you picked the wrong human to impersonate. I knew Rose Tyler.”

She squeezes his fingers, and he flinches away from her. “Jack—”

“No,” he says. “I’ve seen the records. Rose Tyler died during the Battle of Canary Wharf.”

“Rose Tyler went missing during the Battle of Canary Wharf. Different thing.” She sits back in her chair and gives him an impatient look. “I was trapped in a parallel universe, Jack. It made getting in touch with old friends a little difficult.” 

The hard line of his mouth twitches, then relents. “The Cybermen invaded through a breach between our universe and theirs.”

“And lucky girl that I am, I got stuck on the wrong side. I’ve spent the last five years trying to get back.”

His eyes narrow. “To him?”

“No,” she says, and it’s only half a lie. “To stop what’s coming.”

Jack watches her carefully, his face unreadable. “I’m guessing,” he says, “that you don’t mean the Sontarans.”

She blinks. “The who?”  

“I’ll take that as a _no_ ,” he says. Then, slowly, he grins at her. He grins, and she’s nineteen again, falling into his arms. “Rose Tyler,” he says, savouring the sound of it. He slaps the table and laughs. “Little Rosie Tyler!”

She tries to scowl at him. “I meant it when I said I’d shoot you.”

He stands and holds out his arms. “You minx. Uncuff me so I can hug you.” 

She rolls her eyes, still fighting a smile. “So you can grope me, more like.” She pulls the key from her pocket and frees his hands; she barely has time to drop the handcuffs onto the table before he scoops her up in his arms, swinging her in the air. She laughs out loud, fighting the instinct to struggle free. Then his hands wander south, and she gives him a light punch in the ribs. He drops her to her feet, still beaming.

“Rose Tyler,” he says again, holding her by the shoulders. “Rosie Rosie Rose.”

“Yeah,” she says, “I need you to not say my name so much. Or, you know, at all.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Traveling incognito, are we?”

“That, and it’s starting to get annoying.” She slips her hand past his coat lapel and snaps one of his braces. “So. Sontarans?”

He sits on the edge of the break room table. “Militaristic Mr. Potato Heads from the planet Pain in my Ass. We’ve definitively linked them to the ATMOS deaths.”

“Brilliant,” she says. “Then why are you skulking about a high security UNIT base like a well-coiffed cat burglar? Go save the planet.”   

His smile turns deliberate and charming, and once again she can see the hard edge beneath the familiar affection in his eyes. “Time was, you would’ve jumped at the chance to help me.”

“I was young then, Jack. Young and stupid and reckless.” She crosses her arms over her chest and sighs. “Now I suppose I’m just stupid. What do you need?”

He grins. “ _Rosie_.”

“Shut up, Jack. What do you need?”

“Working transmats for myself and my team.” He taps the leather band on his wrist. “My teleport’s fried, and the 21st century, while a lovely place to summer, doesn’t have the parts I’d need to build my own.”

She frowns; Magambo isn’t going to like this. “What kind of range do you need?”

He shrugs, casually. “Two, maybe three hundred miles.”

She stares at him. “You’re going to transmat onto their ship and destroy it from the inside.”

He rubs his hands together and nods. “It’s old school, isn’t it? I’m pretty excited.”

“Jack, it’s _suicide_.”

His smile fades, and his face is like stone. “My people know the risks, and they know what the consequences will be if we do nothing.” _Again_ , he doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to.  

She takes his hand, slipping her fingers through his. His skin is warm. “I’ll get you the equipment,” she says, “but I’m sorry – I can’t come with you.”

“Somehow I knew you’d say that.” He tugs her closer by their joined hands. “Of course, I never invited you.”

“Ass,” she says, and he laughs, leans in and kisses her cheek. They stand close, his hand on her waist. They could be dancing.  

“Were you—” He pauses, and his brief, pained silence makes something cold and sharp settle in the pit of her stomach. “Were you with him when he died?”

“No,” she says. She watches his face. “I saw him after.”

Jack’s eyes close, and in the harsh florescent light he looks painfully young. “Rose, I hacked into the UNIT secure server after I heard, and I – I found this report—”

She grips his fingers hard enough to bruise. “He thought he had time to escape, Jack. The water rose too fast and he – it isn’t true. The report was wrong.”

He looks at her again, and for the first time she wonders how long it’s been, for him. There’s something ancient in his eyes. “Was it?”

“Yes,” she says. “I promise.”    

He exhales a long, tense breath. “All right,” he says, and she can hear it in his voice. He believes her.

There’s a knock at the break room door.

“Enter,” she says sharply, and Jack gives her an amused look.

“General Tyler. Who would’ve thought the military life would suit you so well?”

She pushes him back into his chair. “At ease, Harkness.”  

Captain Magambo opens the door. “Ma’am, Mr. Jones and Ms. Cooper want to speak with you. They’re rather insistent.”

“Let me guess,” Rose says. “Fate of the planet, billions of lives, end of the world? That sort of thing?”

“Precisely.” Magambo arches an eyebrow at Jack’s free hands and the dirty boots he’s propped up on the break room table. “I take it you’ve decided not to have them transferred to the holding facility?”

Rose folds her arms and leans against the table. “Well, we could,” she says, “but since we’re about to give them three of our best transmat prototypes, I don’t see how locking them up would do much good.”

Magambo stares at her. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

Rose shakes her head, grinning. “Nope.”   

Jack bounces out of his chair. “I’ve always relied on the kindness of nameless blonde strangers,” he says, ruffling Rose’s hair. She smacks his hand away, and he gives Magambo a jaunty salute as he strides out the door. “Oh, Ianto, Gwen!” he calls, his voice echoing down the corridor. “Where are my wandering parakeets?”

Magambo watches him go. “Captain Jack Harkness,” she says. “I’ve heard stories about him.”

“They’re probably all true.” She smoothes down her hair. “You know, technically speaking, I don’t have the authority to requisition those prototypes.”

“I know.”

“You, on the other hand—”

The corner of Magambo’s mouth twitches in something like a smile. “This is your idea of asking nicely, isn’t it?”

Rose sits in one of the empty chairs and looks down at the stained tabletop. “I suppose my social skills have got a bit _avant-garde_ in my old age.” She scrapes at the chipped paint with the edge of her thumbnail. “You must think I’m mad for helping them.”

“No,” Magambo says, “I knew you were mad from the beginning. I’ve had time to adjust my expectations.” She sits and folds her arms on the table, leaning forward. “I’ve heard stories about you, too.”

Rose frowns. “What sort of stories?”

“The rubbish sort, mostly. In times like these—” She stops. “Well. People get superstitious.”

“Oh,” Rose says. She glances at the open door and thinks of all the men and women in the warehouse beyond, men and women she’s worked with for months. “They think I’m—” She laughs, an awkward, pained sound. “What do they think, exactly?”

Magambo sits back in her chair, her gaze steady and piercing. “There’s a woman they talk about in the refugee camps. They say that each night she slips past the radiation lines and travels deep into the fallout territories, alone, in the dark.” She pauses. “They say that each dawn she returns, guiding to safety those we’d been forced to leave behind. The lost.”

Rose takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Erisa—”

“She never falls ill, never stays, and never gives her name. An old woman with a young face.” Magambo smiles, not unkindly. “Sound like anyone we know?”

“No,” Rose says. “It doesn’t.” She stands, fists clenched at her sides. “I need those transmat prototypes, Captain, and I need them now. Neither of us have time for stories.” She walks to the door.

“They say you bury them yourself.” Magambo stays in her chair, hands folded in front of her. “All those people. You save them, knowing they’re already dead.” She turns and meets Rose’s eyes. “I don’t follow your orders because you outrank me, ma’am. You don’t.”

There’s a silence. “I know,” Rose says.

“Good.” Magambo stands. “Harkness will have his prototypes. What range does he need?”

“Three hundred miles.”

Magambo’s eyes widen slightly. “A suicide mission?” 

“Yeah.” Rose covers her eyes with one hand, briefly. “It has to be done. If I could go with him—”

“You can’t,” Magambo says, and it isn’t so much a denial as a simple statement of fact. “You’re essential to the success of our mission. If you tried to go with him, I would stop you.”

“Of course you would,” Rose says. She folds her arms across her chest and leans back against the door frame, grinning. “I’m glad I met you, Captain.”

Magambo shakes her head, a small quirk at the corner of her mouth that’s almost a smile. She crosses to the door. “If this operation succeeds, ma’am, you won’t have.”

“I’ll remember anyway.”

Magambo’s smile fades. “Everything?”

Rose doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to.

Magambo reaches out and, for the first time in their three month acquaintance, touches Rose’s shoulder. “Ma’am.”

Rose raises her hand in a small salute. “Captain.”  

Magambo leaves the room. Rose remains, listening to the fading sound of her footsteps.   

++

The lodestone is time travel at its most primitive, its most brutal, and she can feel the rising power like a pressure behind her eyes, an ache at the back of her teeth. Suddenly the cold air of the warehouse tastes sharp, like something she’s forgotten, and she fights the urge to lick her lips. The lights grow brighter, and Donna Noble stands alone in a circle of mirrors.

“Activate,” Magambo shouts, and the warehouse explodes with light.

The lodestone is blinding, and Rose darts away from a bundle of wires just before it explodes in a shower of sparks. She turns and runs for the open door of the TARDIS, Magambo and Private Ellis following close behind. The console room is thick with smoke, and Rose slams up the stairs, towards the fires consuming the time rotor. Glass shatters, the floor quaking beneath their feet, and then from deep within her impossible ship the Cloister Bell sounds. It worked.

“What’s that noise?” Private Ellis says, clutching the doorframe. “Captain, what’s gone wrong?”

“Ma’am,” Magambo says, her hand covering her nose and mouth. “Ma’am, is this—”

Rose turns back to them, a smiling silhouette in smoke and fire. “Well, ladies,” she says. “Looks like Donna Noble just destroyed the universe.” She waves. “Catch you in the one next door.”

Then she feels a familiar pull, a sideways slip through the walls of the world, and she’s standing in the middle of an empty city street – at night, in the drizzle. The air smells a little sour, like rubbish and city rain, and when she looks up she sees the faintest flicker of stars through the haze.

“London,” she breathes. “I’m—”

A door slams open behind her, and three men stumble out of the smoke and sounds of a pub, laughing loudly. “Oh ho,” crows a young, heavyset man. “What have we here?” He trips over his own feet, and the other two men rush forward to catch him. He regains his balance and saunters over to her. “Well, hello there, little miss. You lost?”

“Very,” she says. “What’s today’s date?”

“The fifteenth, I think.” He seems to realise that there’s nothing particularly lecherous about this answer, so he adds a cartoonish leer. “Give me a go, sweetheart, and I’ll make you forget more than the date.”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” she says, and sniffs the air. “So fifteenth of March, is it?” 

He frowns. “April.”       

“Right, of course. Silly me.” She slips her hands into her pockets and rocks back on her heels, her eyes innocent and wide. “And the year?”

One of the man’s friends snickers, shuffling towards them on skinny, unsteady legs. “Girl’s drunker than you, Roger.”

The other friend nods, his head bouncing up and down a few too many times. “Can always count on ol’ Rog to pick the nutters, yeah? He’s like a magnet.” He stops. Considers. “Yeah. A drunk nutter magnet.”

She nods gravely. “It’s like you can see inside my soul.” She takes a few steps backwards. “Well, best be off. A drunk nutter’s work is never done.”

Roger grabs her arm with one meaty hand. “Hey, now – that’s not very friendly. We were only just getting acquainted.”

She looks down at the hand on her arm, then back up into his small, bleary eyes. “You really don’t want to do that.”

He tugs her into his chest. “That so, sweetheart?” 

She laughs, and his eyes narrow. “I’m sorry,” she says, “it’s just sort of cute. You’re probably the least intimidating person I’ve met in, oh, seven or eight universes, and yet here you are—” She easily slips free of his grasp, locks her fingers around his forearm and twists, pinning him in place. She lowers her voice in a gruff imitation of his. “ _That so, sweetheart?_ It’s hilarious.” 

“Oi!” Roger shouts, struggling against her. “Let go!” She does, and as he falls back onto the asphalt a strange shudder runs through his body. He clutches his stomach and cries out, roiling through the pain.

“You sick bitch,” the skinny friend says, kneeling over Roger and grabbing for his hand. “What have you done to him?”

“I didn’t—” she says, but then Roger shudders again, and beneath his shirt something pulls free from his stomach, rolling upward along his torso. Roger shrieks, and a tiny, white hand reaches up from his collar and pats him comfortingly on the chin.

“Holy shit,” the bobble-headed friend says, his voice hoarse. “What is _that_?”

The hand is quickly followed by a small, sweet face. The Adipose wiggles out from beneath Roger’s shirt and hops onto his chest, smiling beatifically at them before jumping to the asphalt and toddling away down the street.

“It’s going to meet the ship,” she says, watching it go. “It’s happening again.” She turns back to the men and crouches down beside them. “Adipose Industries. Where are their offices?” They stare at her blankly, shocked, and she snaps her fingers at them. “Yes, gentlemen, I know it’s all very alarming, but your friend’s life and the lives of thousands of others very probably depend on the answer to this very simple question, so if you could just focus, just for a moment, and tell me – where can I find Adipose Industries?”

“Adipose?” the skinny friend says. His hands are shaking. “My sister works there, she – _oh god_ – she was having trouble meeting her sales quota, so Roger bought those pills. He was doing her a favour—”

“Yes, good, excellent,” she says. “Where does your sister work?”

“Brooks Street. Only a few blocks that way,” he says, and points east. Roger’s stomach begins to move again, and he whimpers in horror.

“Fantastic.” She pops up to her feet. “I’m going to go try to save dear Roger’s life, and if I succeed I’ll expect a full, detailed apology for your behaviour this evening, signed by yourselves and witnessed by your mothers.” She turns to go, but the bobble-headed friend stops her.

“Wait!” She does, and he stares at her, young and drunk and frightened. “Is Roger going to die?”

“I hope not,” she says, and runs.

She heads east, towards Brooks Street, but soon finds her way blocked by a long procession of smiling, cooing Adipose. She slips into a side alley, and she’s deep in the shadows when a strong hand seizes her arm. Instinct kicks in and she reaches blindly for her attacker, slams him _(tall and slim but solid, a staggering weight)_ into the brick wall behind her. She holds her arm hard against his throat, and he jerks his head back, breathing fast. Her gun is already in her hand; she lets it jut into his stomach, her thumb on the safety.

“If you were planning to mug me,” she says, “this really isn’t your night.”

He doesn’t look much like a mugger – it’s hard to tell in the half-light, but he seems to be wearing tweed, and there’s something like a slightly squished bowtie under her arm. He swallows once, his throat working against her forearm, but he doesn’t fight her. “You have a gun,” he says, sounding faintly surprised. “You have a gun, and you’re—” He looks down. “Well, now. Isn’t that interesting.”    

She tips her head to one side. “Interesting? Not the word most people would choose.”

“That,” he says, “is because most people aren’t me.” He grins at her, broadly, and the light catches the eerie gleam of his teeth. “Rose Tyler. You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?”

She goes still, her shoulders stiffening as if bracing for a sudden impact. She studies the man before her, breathless as she takes in his square, exaggerated features, the youth of his grin and the age she sees in his eyes. His face is friendly and deliberately unthreatening, arranged in a hapless _who, me?_ expression that she knows far too well. She should; she’s been using it for years.

“I’m going to take my arm off your throat now,” she says, her voice surprisingly even. “If you move, I’ll shoot you.”

“Sounds fair,” he says, still grinning. Behind the grin there’s another expression altogether, a shadow too well-hidden for her to read. She steps back, releasing his throat but keeping the gun snug against his stomach. Blue shirt beneath a tweed coat, a bowtie and braces – her free hand darts into his breast pocket and for a dizzying moment her fingers grasp impossible, empty space _(bigger on the inside)_ before pulling out a slim leather wallet. She flips it open and, for the first time since she shoved him against the wall, she looks away from his face.

Inside the wallet is a single sheet of psychic paper, and three words scrawl across the empty space in dark, curving ink:  _I’d almost forgotten._

The gun slips back into the holster at her waist, a single, smooth movement despite the slight tremor of her hands. She turns the psychic paper towards him and says, “Forgotten what, Doctor?”

His too-bright grin disappears; he snaps the wallet from her hand and returns it to his pocket. “None of your business.”

She laughs, surprised into a dry chuckle. “Nice.”

He steps away from the wall, straightening his bowtie. “Yes, well, rude again. What did you expect?”

“Not this,” she says. She stares at him – long hair and long face and thin, unsmiling mouth. She stares, but it isn’t this face she sees. “How did it happen?”  

He looks down, and his fringe falls into his eyes “I can’t tell you that.”

Funny how regeneration changes everything but the bits that make her want to smack him. “Oh,” she says through her teeth. “ _Can’t you_.”

“No, no, no,” he says, raising his hands as if to fend her off. “I can, I could, but I shouldn’t. You see, I’m not the me you’re looking for. Or, rather – I’m not that me anymore.” He reaches out and touches her arm, hesitantly. Pats it. “You haven’t found me yet, Rose, but you will. I promise.”

She looks down at the hand on her arm, and he lets it fall back to his side. She takes a slow, deep breath. “I assume,” she says, “you didn’t risk a paradox just to assault me in a dark alley.”

“Assault you?” he says, his voice going slightly high in his indignation. “I gave you a little tap on the shoulder; you’re the one with the—” He makes a strange chopping motion with his hands that may or may not be meant to invoke some sort of martial art, “—and the _say hello to my lee-tle friend_. If anyone assaulted anyone—”

An enormous spaceship passes overhead, its green light filling the sky. Her hand goes again to the gun at her hip, to its comforting weight. “So,” she says. “We should probably do something about that.”

“About what?” He looks up. “Oh. That.” He waves a dismissive hand. “No, Donna and I already took care of it. Are taking care of it. Will have taken care of it?” He wrinkles his nose. “English. Such annoying verb tenses. However you conjugate it, it’s not my problem, and it certainly isn’t yours.”

The Adipose ship glides to a stop in the sky over Brooks Street; she takes an almost unconscious step towards its light. “Then you’re here. You and Donna—”

He slips into her path, hands clasped in front of him. “Rose. You can’t.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Listen to me. It’s not the right time.”

“I don’t follow your orders,” she says. “I don’t even know you.”

His expression hardens and he leans in close, his eyes bright and far too near her own. “In case you’re slower than I remember, I’ll say it again: _it is not the right time_. Now, maybe you don’t believe me. Maybe you think I’m not who you know I am, or maybe I am who I am but I have some obscure, nefarious reason for keeping us apart, or maybe I am who I am but my obscure, nefarious reason for keeping us apart is to damn the timeline and keep you for myself, or – I really don’t know. I’ve run out of stupid human things you might be thinking.” He pauses. “It’s a bit of a strain, thinking at your level. If you can call it thought.”

“Oh, I see,” she says. She gives him a wide, deliberate grin. “I’m going to do something that will piss you off.” 

He takes a step closer, crowding her, and her back hits the rough brick of the alley wall. He doesn’t move away, and he doesn’t touch her. “I am not _pissed off_.”

“You are. You’re furious.” She raises her chin and meets his eyes. “Did I leave you?”

“Yes. No.” He looks away, his jaw tense. “It’s complicated. Will be complicated. Can’t go into it in further detail or the world might end.”

She watches his face, the shadow and the light. The sad twist at the corner of his mouth. “Did you leave me?”

His fingers curl around her wrist, just above the cuff of her jacket. “Rose,” he says, and for the first time she can hear the pain in it. It hurts him to say her name. “I’m only here to prevent a disruption in my timeline. The TARDIS sensed a potential paradox; if I’d known it was you—” He stops, his lips pressed thin.

“If you’d known it was me,” she says, “you would’ve sent someone else.”

He meets her eyes. “Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“I can’t tell you that.” He pauses, and his fingers tighten around her wrist, his thumb sliding low over her pulse. “Amy. Her name is Amy. Amelia Pond.”

She swallows. “Good name. A little fairy tale.”

“You’re one to talk.”  

“Careful. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” She reaches up with her free hand and touches the knot of his bowtie. “I’ve been dreaming about you.”

“Well,” he says, his voice faint, “I am rather dreamy.”

“While I’m awake.”

“Not usually a good sign.” He bends his knees until his eyes are on level with hers and leans in until their noses touch. He looks into her eyes as if searching for something. “Visual and auditory hallucinations?”

“The works,” she says. “Visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile—”

“Gustatory?”  
   
“That’s a bit personal.”

“Is it?” He pulls a long, thin contraption from his coat pocket and holds it to her temple. It whirs, glowing green, before he snaps it away again. “You can learn a lot about something by giving it a good lick. Next time you see dream-me, you ought to go right up to him and—”

“Yes,” she says. “I could taste you.”

He goes still, his eyes wide. “Oh. Right.” He turns away from her, then abruptly turns back. “You’ve been looking for me for a long time. Have I said or done anything in these hallucinations that suggests they might be anything more than simple wish fulfillment?”  

She gives him a wry half-smile. “You think I’ve gone mad.”

He tucks the long contraption back into his coat pocket. “It wouldn’t surprise me, no.”

She looks away, to the night sky in the distance. Thousands of Adipose are rising through the air, toward their ship. Toward home. “You warned me about the Christmas Day crash of the Titanic,” she says. “In Donna’s universe.”

His brow furrows. “Did I tell you how to stop it?”

“No,” she says. “You told me to stay away.”

He snaps his fingers at her, grinning. “Ah, but you didn’t, did you? Rose Tyler runs toward the danger – always has, always will. You can change a lot about a person, but you can’t change that. So you decided to investigate on your own, probably saving the world in the process. Good for you. Question is, how did a hallucination—” He stops and stares into her eyes, but she can tell that he isn’t really seeing her. He’s remembering. “Donna told me. She said that London was destroyed in that universe – only London, though the crash of a ship that size should’ve wiped out all life on Earth. I knew that. I’ve known that for ages.” He moves close again, rests one large palm on the wall by her head and leans in. “Rose Tyler. Furious, gun-toting, grieving Rose Tyler. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I—”

He covers her mouth with his hand. “Do you mind? I’m still thinking.”  

She knocks his hand away from her face. “If you do that again, I’ll bite you.”

“If you bite me, I’ll bite you back.” Suddenly he retreats to a respectful distance, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders held high and tense. “So, odd question but I have to ask it: Rose, this hallucination of yours – does he have one heart?”

She closes her eyes, and the memory rises in the darkness – the chill of his skin under her fingers, and the single, impossible pulse at the inside of his wrist. She takes an unsteady breath. “I don’t want to know. Whatever’s happened to him, whatever’s going to happen – I don’t want to know.”

She feels him touch her cheek, and she flinches away, her eyes flying open. His hand remains in the air, fingers outstretched. Reaching for a face that isn’t there. “Rose,” he says. “I wouldn’t tell you anyway.”

It begins to rain, a slow downpour of heavy, oily drops that cling to their clothes and darken their hair. The Adipose ship is gone, the clouded sky dark without it. She steps around him, into the middle of the alley. Turns and watches him as he watches her, rainwater beading in her eyelashes. “I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other,” she says, eventually.

He looks down at his shoes, his hair curling in the damp. “Five times I’ve said goodbye to you, Rose Tyler, and never expected to see you again.” He raises his eyes to hers. “And five times I’ve been wrong.”

“Well, maybe the sixth time’s the charm,” she says, and though she’s able to force a smile it turns brittle at the edges. She pulls the ‘verse jumper from her pocket, fumbling slightly. “I had no idea I was such a nuisance; I promise to stay out of your way after we save the multiverse. If we save it.”

“Rose—”

She turns away, twisting dials on the jumper. “You can go now, Doctor. We’re done.”

“Oh, honestly,” he says, and then he reaches for her shoulder, turning her into him. His hands are clumsy, his jacket strange and rough under her open palms, but when his mouth touches hers – just at the corner, the barest suggestion, the ellipsis of a kiss – she doesn’t push him away. His lips leave hers a breath later but he stays close, his eyed closed, his cheeks flushed. “Rose. Say something.”

“Blimey,” she says, and he laughs, a low, choked sound. He kisses the rise of her cheek, his lips dry and cool, and long fingers curl into her hair.

“I really wasn’t going to do this,” he says, and she wants to taste the smile she hears in his voice. She lifts her chin and her mouth catches his, briefly. His fingers clench, knuckles bumping against the base of her skull. “I wasn’t. I specifically forbade myself.”

“That sounds serious.”

“It is. Very.” His forehead rests against hers and he swallows hard. When he speaks again, his voice is rough. “Nothing good comes of nostalgia, Rose. It’s long past time for me to let go.”

She touches his lapel, resting her fingers over his pocket and the psychic paper inside. “To forget?”

“Maybe,” he says. “If I can.”

She nods. Steps out of his arms and looks up into his face, her eyes stinging and dry. “I’ve been looking for you so long – years longer than the time I spent travelling with you.”  She reaches out and takes his hand, twining her fingers through his. The fit is wrong, but that only makes her hold tighter. “I hope you never have to say goodbye again,” she says. “I hope you forget.”

The Doctor squeezes her hand once, hard, and then they both let go.

The ‘verse jumper lies at their feet; she’d dropped it when he kissed her, dropped it with a carelessness that shocks her a little, now that she thinks of it. The Doctor bends down and picks the jumper off the asphalt, turning it over idly in his hands. He pulls the long contraption from his pocket again and holds it to the navigational control before she can protest; it whirs, glowing green. Then he tucks the sonic screwdriver back into his pocket.

“I’ve programmed your next two destinations,” he says. “You’ll leave as soon as it’s finished building its charge.” He presses the jumper into her hands. “Three minutes, at the most. Then you’ll be gone.”  

She slides the jumper into her jacket pocket. “And where will I be going?”

“Let it be a surprise. One last wonderful surprise.” He folds his hands in front of him, knitting his fingers together. “Well. You may not think it’s so wonderful, but these things are a matter of perspective.”

“Most things are.”

“Most things,” the Doctor says, “are only a matter of time, and time—”

“—is only a matter of perspective. I know.” She smiles at him, her chest aching. “Three minutes left, and we spend it talking nonsense.”

“Excuse me, what’s wrong with nonsense? Nonsense is the best sort of sense there is. I never feel so sensible as when I’m talking nonsense.” He looks away. Swallows. “I should probably go. Before you—”

“Yeah,” she says, softly.

Neither of them moves. They stand silently for a long moment, his eyes everywhere but her face. Then, finally, he looks at her. “I’ll tell you, Rose. Before it’s over, I’ll tell you everything.”

“I think you know that’s not true.” She raises her hand, rests her palm against the center of his chest and feels the heavy double beat within. She looks up and meets his eyes. “I find you.”

“Yes.” 

“Then that’s all I need to know.” She lowers her hand. “Goodbye, Doctor,” she says, and walks away.

He doesn’t follow.

Two blocks until she reaches the police barricade on Brooks Street, and she stops, stands among the milling crowd. The rain eases as she waits, listening silently to awed, frightened whispers of _diet pills_ and _fat babies_ and _aliens, again, can you believe it?_ She knows the atmosphere well, the respite after the storm, the slow return to normalcy. The shaken, almost giddy relief of those who survive. He’ll leave now – he and Donna may already be standing together at the TARDIS console, grinning like idiots and having a laugh about _diet pills_ and _fat babies_ and _London, again, can you believe it?_  
  
Her grip tightens on the barricade, and the wood splinters a little under her fingers.

“Listen,” a familiar, female voice says, and then Donna Noble is standing behind her, flushed and beautiful and impossibly happy. She looks at Rose with a friendly sort of blankness, without the slightest hint of recognition in her eyes.

He was right; it’s too soon. If the Doctor is with her, if he sees her now—

“Listen,” Donna says, and Rose does nothing. Says nothing. It must look like agreement, because Donna says, “There’s this woman who’s going to come along – a tall, blonde woman called Sylvia. Tell her, _That bin there_.” Donna points, grinning as if she’s just told a wonderful joke. “It’ll all make sense, just – _that bin there_.” Then Donna turns, still grinning, and runs off.

Seconds later Rose fades away, and it’s as if she was never there at all.


End file.
